Sunday, 19 October 2014

Bernd Behr + Le Corbusier

Amoy Gardens
consists of a 35mm slide projection depicting 34 scenarios in and
around the eponymous building in Hong Kong, a large-scale development
including apartment blocks above a shopping mall. The complex became an
epicentre of the region’s 2003 SARS crisis through a malfunction of its
ventilation and plumbing systems, leading to a perpetual circulation of
the virus throughout its interior. The timed, looped projection is
accompanied by an audio recording of a young citizen of Hong Kong
reading extracts from Exact Air, Le Corbusier’s treatise on hermetically sealed architecture (The Radiant City, 1933). Her struggle with and re-invention of the manifesto generates a new contingent space between crisis and proposal, event and narrative.